Flying Seafood Special

"Fly, my pretties! Fly! Fly!"

"Isn't she from Jugpot? I didn't know she could fly."

— Hewpoe, Klonoa (Wii), on Pamela the giant fish.

You know what fish are — those scaly finned things with the big fin for a tail that live in various bodies of water... except for these things, which forget that last part.

For some reason, in fiction — especially Video Games — one can encounter fish that float in the air. Given sufficient animation, in fact, they will clearly be swimming through the air. These creatures are typically found on beaches and around waist-deep water — but not always. The next most common habitat for the Flying Seafood Special is the desert.

Rays seem particularly popular, probably due to already having wings. But it doesn't have to be fish; you can have Flying Electric Jellyfish, Flying Giant Squid, Air Whales...

As for what the reasons might be for such beings to exist, two stand out as primary — it allows the characters to interact with them (typically by fighting them) by the path of least Willing Suspension of Disbelief, or alternately it works as a touch of surreality.

This also happens in nearly every Mons series ever. OK, now since there are more aquatic creatures than any other kind on Earth, obviously you're going to have to throw in some Mons based on fish somewhere. Except the problem is, 90% of your game takes place on land. Hrm. Well, just have them act like they're swimming through the air. Not Quite Flight, just hovering ever so slightly over the ground at all times. Problem solved! Nobody would question that!

Related to If It Swims, It Flies and The Sky Is an Ocean. Compare Space Whale, Terrestrial Sea Life, and Living Gasbag. Not to be confused with Shamu Fu. Can be a type of Airborne Mook. Fish People are similarly air-dwelling sea-creatures (and if their culture has a Horse of a Different Color, expect it to be something like this — most likely a seahorse).

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Bleach:
  • In the Bount arc, the Bount Sawatari's doll is the giant rock-like fish Baura that can fly through the air, as well as under the ground (by phasing through another dimension).
  • The released form of Unohana's zanpakutou, while it's got only one eye and it's green, is shaped like a manta ray and has baleen in its mouth.
• Doraemon has a gadget, the Flying Fish Food, that when fed to fishes will make them swim through the air for prolonged periods of time. It appropriately debuts in a chapter titled "Flying Fish".
• Fairy Tail: There are fish that fly through the air like birds. Happy fished for them, but they tasted terrible.
• In The Kajiki Chef: Divine Cuisine, the eponymous kajiki are divinely created animals that mainly resemble real life animals. Kajiki versions of marine sea life freely float about in the air as if it were an ocean with little regard for other life or human structures. The main exception shown so far is an octopus so massive in chapter 7 that its tentacles drag upon the ground as it wanders around Japan.
• In MegaMan NT Warrior (2002), a virus Navi infects the robot fish in an aquarium, making them suddenly float right out of their tanks and take to the streets.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • One of the things Haruna sketches and brings to life is a flying manta ray she uses to get away from one of Fate's minions. Nodoka proves to be quite adept at piloting it too.
• Tokyo ESP heavily features a large school of flying fish that give people superpowers
• In Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Sky-Byte transforms into a shark which can fly (as well as burrow underground).
• The☆Ultraman has it's share of marine life-based kaiju as various Monster of the Week, from Zanba the giant alien manta ray to Garbados the tentacled mollusc monster.

Art

• Hieronymus Bosch included a few floating fish in his paintings◊, among other very peculiar things...
• Michelangelo Buonarroti's The Torment of St. Anthony includes a flying demon that has no wings and seems to be swimming into the air by virtue of its fishy tail.
• Keith Thompson has a large air whale, dead, rotting away. Reminiscent of his work on Leviathan, but with more zombie.

Asian Animation

• In Happy Heroes Season 2 episode 50, villains Big M. and Little M. get a shark that floats around in the air.

Comic Books

• Creature Tech: The Big Bad's plot is to revive a long-dead giant space eel using the Shroud of Turin. The book opens and ends with splash panels of giant eels flying through space.
• Hellboy: The Communist Airborne Mollusk Militia from The Goon crossover consists of octopi who actually use hot air balloons to fly.
• Further Notes On My Unfortunate Condition: In "Tell Me Again Why I Can't Be A Manta Ray", the protagonist-as-manta ray soars through the sky, "drifting from town to town, from house to house."
  "And I am Undulating Away Through the Night Air"
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: A throwaway gag has Scrooge witnessing trout swimming by at shoulder level during extremely heavy rainfall.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Acanti are space whales often used by the Brood as spaceships.
  • The Mighty Thor: As Thors from the past, present, and future sail through the heavens in a Viking longboat in Jason Aaron's Thor: God of Thunder, they encounter — and yes, fight — space sharks. Past Thor, having not yet become Worthy of Mjolnir and thus being unable to fly, at one point actually rides one, coming out with the immortal line "Haaa! Faster, you stupid shark!"◊ The space sharks appear intermittently throughout Aaron's other works, as well.
  • Another run of the Silver Surfer had him taking a companion to see some "Cosmic Rays". That is to say the vividly colored manta ray creatures that fly through the cosmos, not the occasionally superpower giving radioactive phenomenon in space.
  • Sub-Mariner: Some writers attempt to explain Namor's flight as him not so much flying as condensing the moisture around him so he can swim through the air.
• The Sandman (1989): Delirium's fish, which are usually used to symbolize madness, are always seen swimming through the air (or rough equivalent, in areas where there's no clear sense of place, such as her story in Endless Nights).
• Atomic Robo: The third time The Shadow From Beyond Time shows up, it takes the form of a flying, multi-eyed squid.
• In Eight Billion Genies, Fun City is an immense city with tall art-deco skyscrapers riding on the back of a flying winged whale.

Films — Animated

• Disney Animated Canon:
  • Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The ancient Atlanteans got around on flying vehicles shaped like fish and hammerhead sharks. The Leviathans likewise flew, as seen in the prologue. After Atlantis is destroyed, the remaining one moves underwater instead.
  • Fantasia 2000: One number features flying whales that swim through the atmosphere and breach into space like regular whales breaching into the air.
• In Trolls World Tour, the Techno trolls are first introduced as aquatic and appear to be troll merpeople. However, in the climax and ending, when the Techno trolls appear on land, they're seen floating above the ground and breathing just fine.

Films — Live-Action

• Immortal gives us the hovering Dayak, who looks like a red hammerhead sharktopus.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) has the protagonist batting flying fish around, apparently so the filmmakers could throw something at the audience in 3D.
• Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. A 50-ton Megalodon shark leaps up to cruising altitude to chomp a Boeing 747. It is not explained how this is possible. Probably because no explanation would help it make sense.
• Moby Dick 2010. The ability of the Monster Whale to breach is now upgraded to being able to leap over islands.
• Piranha Part Two: The Spawning features, you guessed it, flying piranhas.
• Sky Sharks has the creatures carrying AAMs and being used as mounts by Nazi zombies to attack air traffic.
• Star Wars: The Aiwha in Attack of the Clones are whale-like creatures capable of leaping out of the sea and flying through immense, wing-like fins. Their name is itself a contraction of "air whale".

Jokes

The soldier asks the Sergeant:
Comrade Sergeant, do crocodiles fly?
Of course not! What nonsense!
Really?.. But Comrade Lieutenant said that they fly...
Well, they fly, but only very, very low.
But Comrade Lieutenant said that they fly high.
At first they are low, and then they soar!

— Soviet army joke

Literature

• Babiole: A winged, flying dolphin appears under the ownership of a prince.
• In the Bas-Lag Cycle, the Grindylow are a race of eel-tailed Fish People who can "swim" as swiftly in air as in water. It's unclear whether this is an innate trait, a function of their strange thaumaturgy, or both.
• The Black Company spend some time in the Plain of Fear, which is home to wind-whales and flying mantas. There are also coral reefs, but those are on the (desert) ground, not in the air.
• Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin: The heroes fight off a kraken from their zeppelin.
• Evolution: Air-breathing fish that fly with winglike fins are among the creatures that populate the Earth thirty million years after humanity's downfall.
• "The Horror of the Heights", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, describes a high-altitude ecology of organisms resembling deep-sea life. This served as the inspiration for the Air-Kraken, a popular Steampunk æthernet meme.
• The eponymous Leviathan is a living biotech airship ultimately derived from a sperm whale. It still generally resembles its original stock, albeit the size of the Graf Zeppelin and loaded with hydrogen-filled gas bladders. There are also huxleys, flying and hydrogen-filled jellyfish derivatives used as hot air balloons.
• A Meeting With Medusa features a Jupiter inhabited by peaceful, cloud-grazing manta rays. Except that they're not — peaceful or cloud-grazing, that is. The "clouds" they feed on turn out to be enormous jellyfish which may actually be sapient.
• The Mermaid Variations: The rain in Wales is so dense that Caroline the mermaid can swim right up through it into the sky.
• Natural Selection: The Demonray are a flying, air-breathing, implausibly intelligent, tree-climbing carnivorous manta relative from the abyss. For extra amusement, they actually try explaining (poorly) how it flies with a lot of nonsense science...
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: During the long rain, fish swim through the incredibly water-saturated air in the house.
• The sequel to Fragment, Pandemonium, features jellyfish-like molluscs which are able to float through the air by means of a chemical reaction within internal gas sacs that produces hot air which lifts them up. These range from small flitting nudibranch-like creatures to immense zeppelin-like "blimp whales" capable of swallowing whole anything in their path.
• In Sewer, Gas & Electric, a mutant great white Meisterbrau pursues a victim onto dry land, then spreads its oversized pectoral fins and swoops onto the unfortunate schmuck.
• Sorcery!: The waters of Lake Iklakkla, besides being the lair of the Water Serpent, also houses swarms of flying fishes with razor-sharp teeth.
• Star Wars Legends adores these, mostly vast and in the form of flying whales.
  • Alderaan was the homeworld of a huge variety of thrantas, giant, flying whale-like creatures.
  • In the gas giant Bespin there are the more rayfish-like velkers with 300 meter wingspans, which hunt the much, much bigger flying jellyfish called beldons, while on a much smaller scale rawks hunt tiny winged fish◊, and a species of thranta was introduced there before their homeworld exploded.
• The Stormlight Archive has "skyeels", which fly using gas sacs. Later installments mention in passing that they use spren-assisted flight (possibly the Surge of Gravitation, but never mentioned as such), and that the spren in question perform a similar function to every Giant Enemy Crab on the planet that would otherwise collapse under their own weight.
• In Xandri Corelel, Psittaca is inhabited by giant flying rays. The Psittacans strap baskets under them and use them as transportation.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • "Army of Ghosts": During the opening narration, the Doctor and Rose are shown visiting a planet with flying stingrays.
  • The Horde of Flying Robot Stingrays in "Planet of the Dead".
  • "A Christmas Carol" is set on a planet covered in dense clouds and fog that fish can swim through using electrical pulses. There is a flying shark.
• In Encantadia, among the wildlife that inhabits the kingdom of Sapiro are flying manta rays.
• The Future is Wild: The flish are fishes that, 200 million years from now, evolved into the role of by then-extinct birds, developing lungs and flying with powerful pectoral fins. Sea-dwelling fish (with the exception of sharks) are entirely extinct by that point, leaving the flying ones as the only kind left. There's also a forest variant that even hangs upside down like a bat.
• Hero Corp has flying rays living in the forest. Not seen because of the low special-effects budget, but the protagonists mention that they taste weird.
• Monster Warriors: In "Day of the Piranha", the Monster Warriors are trapped in a cabin in the woods and being attacked by a school of mutant man-eating flying piranhas.
• Ultraman Leo: Many of the Flying Saucer Beasts. Silver Bloome and Absorba are jellyfish, Black Dome is a crab, Deemos is a brittle star, Black Terrina is a clam, and Hangler is an anglerfish.
• The Young Ones: Vyvyan once looks out the window, sees a shark passing by the glass, and declares it the most completely brilliant thing he'd ever seen. Then Mike spoiles it by explaining that London had flooded, meaning that the shark was only swimming, not flying.

Music

• Asia's Aqua album has a winged dolphin flying in space.
• Driftless Pony Club: A flying whale appears in the music video for "Inspectors of Inspectors".
• Flying whales appear throughout Jung Kook's "Dreamers" video.
• Koronba:
  • In "Kuromaguro ga Tonde Kuru", bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna are shown to fly and can even target people.
  • In "Iwashi ga Tsuchi kara Haete Kurunda", sardines can fly from the soil (from which the song is named).
  • In ".", giant jellyfish can fly above utility poles. They use this to eat their prey.
• Linkin Park's "In the End" music video has a whale flying in the newly greened desert.
• Steam Powered Giraffe take on Sky Sharks in their album Vice Quadrant: A Space Opera. Also contains a song regarding Space Whales.
• Tears for Fears: In the "Closest Thing to Heaven" music video, Brittany Murphy's character encounters several goldfishes "swimming" in the sky while she's travelling in a hot air balloon.
• Yes's Concept Album Tales from Topographic Oceans has a school of fish lazing through some kind of misty air-stream emanating from a distant pyramid on a starry night on the cover. Because Roger Dean, that's why.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Balance: The Voidfish doesn't need water to live, and otherwise floats through the air.

Tabletop Games

• Arduin: Air sharks and air squid are precisely what they sound like — otherwise normal versions of usually marine creatures that happen to swim around in midair. They do this by storing lighter-than-air gasses in their bodies, which tends to have... explosive... reactions to lightning. There are also skyrays, which look like flying mantas but are actually flying fungus creatures.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Cloud rays are named so not because they flies in the clouds but because you might mistake them for such.
  • Uobilyth is a variant of aboleth that flies in the sky, aboleths being immensely ancient fish-like horrors.
  • 3.5 and 4^th Editions have the Astral Kraken. In 3.5, it's a mindless giant vermin that prowls the Astral Plane for life forces to consume; in 4e, it's an evil super-genius psychic horror from beyond the stars that exists to spread madness.
  • Dark Sun has Floater, a species of sapient (if somewhat dumb) hydrogen jellyfish.
• Eclipse Phase has whales, known as Suryas, that live in the corona of the sun. Since there is no material on the sun that isn't gaseous or plasmatic, it's safe to call this flight. Said whales also happen to be humans (well, mostly, there's some uplifted whales and A.I.s who've sleeved in Suryas). Eclipse Phase is that kind of game.
• Exalted:
  • Noresores and demjen are demons resembling, respectively, ethereal, translucent moray eels and merpeople, and both swim through the air.
  • Khomfai are Malfean animals resembling immense jellyfish, some the size of whales, floating through the air.
• Fantasy Fliers has a wide variety of mounts, from technological and magical constructs (some of which are water-based themselves, like a sky boat or submersible) through the usual suspects such as dragons, things you might expect to fly, such as birds and bugs, all the way up to this trope, featuring rays, sharks, cephalopods, and nautilus.
• Magic: The Gathering: It's not uncommon for cards based sea life to show up as sky-dwelling creatures ^note Mechanically, this means a creature with a creature type associated with the water also having the keyword Flying. Virtually all of them use blue mana, which is associated with both water and the Flying ability.
  • Flying fish actually have existed for quite some time in the game, although the creature type Fish (creature type being the relative equivalent of species) was only officially created in 1997. Case in point: as early as the year 2000, we have Cloudskate, a flying manta ray, and Amugaba, a flying eel, but both have the creature type of Illusion instead (perhaps as a Lampshade Hanging). Then there is also Mulldrifter, an Elemental (in Lorwyn, Elementals are amalgamations of many animals, and this one just happens to be part fish and part bird). Actual flying fish would be introduced later in the form of Windrider Eel and Sky-Eel School, in addition to erratas which give other sea-creature types to those that don't have them when they are printed.
  • Aside from fish, other creature types traditionally associated with the sea have appeared as sky-based creatures. Leviathans appear as flying creatures often enough that nearly a third of all Leviathan creatures have Flying, beginning with Eater of Days (in actuality a flying construct based on a leviathan) and Sky Swallower (the first actual flying leviathan). Later, the 2016/17 expansions based on the plane of Kaladesh introduce flying whales, while a flying elemental whale debuts in the 2020 Commander set.
• Numenera:
  • Malorks are creatures resembling large carnivorous fishes, but instead of swimming in the water they live in the endless skies of Urvanas.
  • The sorg are aliens who resemble clams twice the size of a human who fly thanks to antigravity devices secured to their shells.
• Pathfinder:
  • Ekekehs are a type of dolphin-like fey that can levitate themselves at will, and their gills can process both air and water. They're often found floating their way through the streets of coastal cities in order to interact with terrestrial sapients, although they can only move through the air at a very slow and limited pace.
  • The nightwave, the most powerful variety of the shadowy undead nightshades, is shaped like a titanic shark but can magically fly as fast as it can swim, and so cannot be escaped by simply leaving the water. They do prefer aquatic terrains however, as water around them takes on the darkness and pressure of the deepest ocean depths to crush and blind their foes.
• Rifts contains the odd sea creature-shaped airborne monster.
  • Underseas details a sapient ray that can use hooks on the end of its wings to type with; they often learn to use tech items which are mostly controlled by buttons and other panel controls, even though they obviously don't have the ability to make them.
  • Some marine magic has incantations like Air Swim, which can allow sea creatures to swim in air, if they also have the ability to breathe without water; usually used by dolphins, orca and some sentient alien whales, eg. the rhino whales.
  • The air fish of Wormwood resemble nothing so much as monstrous piranhas swimming through the air.
• Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, and Warhammer 40,000:
  • Screamers of Tzeentch, sometimes referred to as sky-sharks in-universe, resemble flying stingrays.
  • The Idoneth Deepkin are undersea elves who use large sea creatures to fly through air. There is even a shipwreck that also moves onto the field with them.

Toys

• The Airshark is a remotely-guided toy airship shaped like a shark or clownfish.
• Mixels has the Flexers. While they can't fly, they're elasticity-based, letting them propel themselves to great heights and made their home in a city made of building suspended in midair. They include Kraw (a crab), Tentro (a squid), and Balk (a hammerhead shark). Their Max form also resembles a lobster or shell-less hermit crab.

Video Games

• Animal Kaiser has floating sharks, among other things.
• Asura's Wrath: Many of the giant flying Gohma look like fish. Gohma Stingers look like rays, Gohma Gliders resemble lionfish, and Gohma Crushers look like giant flying squid mixed with shellfish. Gohma Carriers are barnacles.
• In Beyond Good & Evil, there are two giant, flying manta-rays that you can take pictures of.
• Bio-Hazard Battle has you fight flying squid at the very start of the opening stage. Then again, pretty much all the animals in that game have been mutated and such by a virus.
• Castlevania has Forneus, flying jellyfish. They're actually modeled after the Solomonic demon of the same name, who is said to appear as a sea monster; the same demon appears in Shin Megami Tensei and spin-offs as a manta ray.
• Cave Story has jellyfish that can float in air in Grasstown. They appear in Waterway where they can be found swimming in water.
• City of Heroes: Nova-form Kheldians resemble flying squids.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth has the Rocktopus, a bio-engineered monster used by the Harmony affinity which actually looks more like a jellyfish than an octopus. Due to incorporating Floatstone into its body the creature can levitate all the way into orbit and serves as a Kill Sat weapon emplacement.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun gives us the Tiberian Floater in the expansion, a freakish jellyfish-like creature that floats through the air and attacks your units.
• Cosmic Star Heroine features spectral fish flying inside the airtight corridors of an Underwater Base to attack the Player Party.
• Crossed Swords have giant blue jellyfishes that floats out of rivers to slap at you with their stingers.
• Cuphead: In "Perilous Piers", the airborne enemies consist of fish flying with winglike fins and sea stars floating in bubbles.
• Darius:
  • Every enemy in the series is some form of giant mechanical sealife, with the occasional dinosaur, chameleon, or fetus thrown in for good measure. They don't just stick with the obvious like squids, barracudas, and sharks; there are half a dozen different coelacanth bosses, not to mention a cuttlefish, a tripod fish, a blue whale, and weirdest of all, a sea angel (look it up—they're pretty, harmless, and pretty harmless.) and even a Barreleye fish◊.
  • Parodied to hell and back by "Space Invaders '95" in the food level; among other things, before the boss fight, the screen flashes with Darius' trademark Boss Warning Siren and "Warning! Dangerous warship SUSHI PLATTER is approaching!" Then you fight a giant sushi combo platter.
• Digimon: All aquatic Digimon, regardless of how fishlike they are, can move comfortably in the air. Unlike the other examples, they're shown doing this in some episodes of the anime, too. Seadramon and Submarimon achieved flight in some minor appearances.
• Dragon Quest XI has Cetacea, a massive flying whale who serves as the main party's Global Airship in the latter half of the game. In the distant past, she fulfilled the same role for Erdwin and his party during their own adventure.
• The Drop: Some of the enemies are fish, even though the battle takes place on land. Naturally, they No-Sell all water-based attacks.
• Dungeon Fighter Online has a number of flying fish, most especially sharks. This does get explained; a feature of the main world in this game is the Sky Tower (currently destroyed), which connects a pair of upper and lower continents and converts the upper oceans into lower sky, managing the resulting complex weather systems. The "vertical rivers" produced where the charged water can support air-breathers and the thickened air can buoy and support aquatic life are so ancient that evolution and magic have resulted in a number of truly amphibious species.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Undead creatures don't need to breathe, and the game makes no distinction between land creatures and water creatures besides what they breathe. This can result in undead whales or carp moving across land to attack your fortress. The undead carp in particular are infamous for being Demonic Spiders.
  • The Good Bad Bug with the flying lungfish also qualifies for this trope, as many players are dazzled by finding lungfish soaring high in the air. It also led to community jokes about them being The Determinator who conquered water, land and air, and are ready to do the same for magma.
• Earthworm Jim features fish enemies that fly by means of attached rotor blades. Said fish can be found in a level set in the intestines.
• Ecco the Dolphin: The Tides Of Time has future dolphins who evolved to be capable of flight. There is also a giant flying jellyfish.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the netch, giant leathery floating jellyfish. Females ("Betty Netch") are smaller but with a potent physical attack. Males ("Bull Netch") are larger and can launch a ranged poison attack.
• Eternal Sonata has enemies that resemble swordfish. They're just as much at home hovering over the sand as hovering over the water as hovering over a spiral ramp that plays music when you walk on it. It's all the same. In fact, there are several hovering enemies that resemble aquatic life in this game.
• Etrian Odyssey has quite some examples.
  • The first game has Corotrangul, a higly evolved manta ray that can hover in the air and take control of water as well as wind; it serves as the boss of Azure Rainforest. There's also an orange clownfish-like creature with blue fins that appears in Sandy Barrens.
  • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: In addition to bringing back Corotrangul from the first game, now an Optional Boss that can be fought in the sea, the game also introduces Narmer (renamed Wicked Silurus in Etrian Odyssey Nexus); it's a large, aggressive silurus that usually hangs around muddy areas, but can also hover in the air (and actually does so during battle).
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Nimon is a player character example. He is a Deepnoid, a Fish People from the undersea kingdom of Deep Haven, and can freely move around underwater with dexterity. In game terms, he flies. And when he officially joins up with the team in their fight against the Dark Force invasion of Earth and fights alongside them on land, he still flies.
• Final Fantasy games do this a lot.
  • In Final Fantasy, once you get the ship, you can get into random battles while sailing. One of the first enemies you can encounter while sailing is sharks. The sprite doesn't seem to show anything special about them, other than their willingness to jump on your boat to eat you. They actually are one of the toughest, if not the toughest, enemies you'll first encounter sailing, so they must have some sort of advantage fighting on the boat.
  • Final Fantasy VI
    • There are crabs and stingrays, in the desert. Many of the aquatic creatures that can be found in the desert actually lose health every round. Considering that at least two of them have practically no health at all, and have some great items to steal, it turns them into a Metal Slime battle.
    • In the Veldt, all the creatures the player has encountered so far in the game (except for most bosses ^note A notable exception being the Holy Dragon) have a chance to show up in Random Encounters. That includes things like jellyfish sitting out in the savanna while suffering no ill effect.
    • The first time Ultros shows up, it's in a river. Odd for a saltwater creature, but believable. Then, in the rafters (and the main stage) of an Opera House. Then the bone-dry caves of a mountain. Then in a mid-air battle (the party is standing on the deck of an airship. Ultros is, uh, floating.)
  • Final Fantasy XI: In the area Al'Taieu (commonly nicknamed as "sea" by the playerbase) there are various types of enemies that somewhat resemble aquatic life (which in turn are also nicknamed as sharks, goldfish, etc.) All of them are capable of floating in the air. "Phuabo" enemies, which resemble blue manta rays, actually "hide" underneath the water until you walk over them, at which point they surface, glide into the air, and start to attack.
  • Final Fantasy XII has various types of sandfish in the sandsea, as well as the floating fish you encounter in the sewers.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, skyfishing, sandfishing, and lavafishing is a thing for the Fisher Job. Also, fishing in toxic atheriochemical waste. Naturally, there are also enemies like jellyfish, stingrays, and sharks that hover above the ground and have no trouble moving around to attack you. The lorebook explains that many of the aquatic monsters have a gas sack in their bodies that enable them to float without being in the water.
• Fossil Fighters: As with most Mons media, aquatic vivosaurs float in midair when not submerged. Inverted by fliers fighting Under the Sea.
• Gears of War: The Reavers and Nemacysts have a decidedly squid-like appearance, and no visible methods of flight. Yet they do. Fast.
• In Gotcha Force, the Diver set of Borgs "swim" through the air via a bubble of water constantly around them that slows down any other Borgs who hop into it.
• In God of War Ragnarök, Hafgufas are a kind of animal that resembles a giant jellyfish which float in the skies of Alfheim once freed from the caves they were trapped in.
• In Hollow Knight, flying jellyfish-like enemies (called ooma and uoma) can be found in Fog Canyon. They're pretty harmless, floating aimlessly without attacking, but ooma explode upon defeat. The boss of the area, Uumuu, is a much larger example.
• Into the Breach: The Vek Psions are octopus-like Kaiju that hover above the ground.
• Journey (2012): Not exactly seafood, but the red cloth creatures flying through the air are all modeled after sea life: the smallest tatters gather in shoals like tiny fish, the slightly larger ones resemble dolphins, while the largest in the game are pretty much whales.
• Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]: The Fin Fatale and Tatsu Steed dream eaters both swim through the air (Though they can't fly, hovering a few feet above the ground at most), and the former can even dive into solid ground for surprise attacks. Appropriately, they're the only dream eaters who don't end up Floating in a Bubble while playing the Water Barrel minigame.
• Klonoa: Door to Phantomile has Pamela the flying fish. She's only seen swimming and jumping at first, so Klonoa and Huepow are very surprised when she flies up to them later on, pulling a Big Damn Heroes to help them get to the Sun Temple, which is in the sky.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has one quest boss called the Thunder Quaker, which is a flying loach. A later chapter then introduces a new enemy, the sharkodile, which are half shark, half crocodile, and floats around in the landed spaces in the Absurdly Spacious Sewers of Heimdallr.
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: Convexity, an outer space-like Void Between the Worlds, is home to creatures resembling flying jellyfish, eels, and nautilus-whale hybrids.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The Wind Fish is a giant, flying and winged whale.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
    • The third boss, Gyorg, "Mechanical Masked Fish", starts off the fight with a creepy first-person view as it sneaks up on you, followed with it jumping out of the water and stopping midair to pose for the camera. Whether it's a good thing or not that it doesn't have levitation powers like this after the introductory cutscene is debatable.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap has a boss which is two variants of the Gyorg species, which are flying manta rays. Which fly at about air craft level and whom Link must fight by standing on them and attacking. There's also the sand swimming variants in Spirit Tracks.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has flying jellyfish. Electrified flying jellyfish.
• The Legends of Owlia: Since the Big Bad of the game is the king of the merfolk, expect to see floating sea creatures in the game as enemies.
• Mass Effect:
  • The hanar are sentient jellyfish-like creatures that use technology to allow them to hover slightly above the ground.
  • Shepard's fish tank is an unintentional example, thanks to a bug where the fish are not in fact restrained in any way by the tank and can actually be found several feet outside it, floating in midair.
  • The Reapers were built in the image of immense squid-like sea creatures referred to only as "the Leviathans".
• Mega Man X4 has Jet Stingray. Like his name suggests, he's a robotic stingray that can fly around via jets.
• Metal Slug: From the third game onwards, Flying Killers are piranha-like fish that occasionally show up to antagonize players, popping out of water surfaces and flying straight at the player in an attempt to chew them to their bones. Later levels set on dry land would sometimes have tanks which release flying fishes on the players instead. For some inexplicable reason, Flying Killers are prone to dropping spare ammunition when killed.
• Metroid II: Return of Samus: The Octrolls resemble large, floating purple octopus.
• Minecraft has Phantoms, Airborne Mooks that are undead flying manta rays, travel in packs, and appear at night to swoop down on the player — but only appear when the player hasn't slept for three days, since they're attracted to insomnia. They drop a Phantom Membrane when killed, which is used to repair the player's Elytra wings.
• Monster Eye has flocks of flying fishes which flies out of the water to attack you as you cross a pier.
• Monster Rancher: The Ogyo are floating pink dolphins.
• New Super Marisa Land has Scuba Fairies that act similarly to the Cheep Cheeps from Super Mario Bros.. They are much more dangerous, however, owing to the random intervals at which they leap from the water, and their arc.
• In No Man's Sky, you can encounter flying creatures that resemble large worms and sometimes even flying fish, floating in the air with nothing resembling wings. While travelling through interplanetary space you can also encounter large jellyfish-like creatures called "Children of Helios". You can also find smaller jellyfishes "swimming" inside derelict freighters drifting through space.
• Obduction has giant fish/cetacean creatures that once swam in the skies of Kaptar.
• Pajama Sam: In No Need to Hide When it's Dark Outside, Pajama Sam makes his way into a Mad Scientist Laboratory and find a potion book with a lot of colorful chemicals. One of the spells he can cast is Fish From The Air. They swim around him for a few seconds, and then disappear as quickly as they came.
• Parodius: Every game lets you play as a flying octopus, with later games adding mambo fish to the cast. This is one of the less weird things about the series.
• Perfect World has the mob Orbfish, appearing in the Tideborn Islands. They're basically orb-shaped fish with huge bulbous eyes that, if you tame it as a pet, can actually fly several hundred feet above the ground with no problem whatsoever.
• Pikmin features Jellyfloats, which are essentially hovering jellyfish that suck up their prey rather than sting it. Pikmin 3 introduces similar floating jellyfishes named Slurkers.
• Pokémon:
  • In the core series games, you can pull out your anglerfish Pokémon and use it to battle armadillos in the middle of the desert, and it will have the advantage. Somehow. Gyarados, Mantine and Mantyke justify this, being Water/Flying types.
  • In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon sub series, your characters follow behind you instead of being kept in balls. Let's go into a volcano and bring a goldfish with a horn on it with us. It'll do great! In an inversion, Pokémon that shouldn't have been able to breathe underwater could be taken on adventures in dungeons filled with saltwater at the bottom of the sea.
  • The float whale pokémon Wailord is the largest Pokémon by volume (tallest listed height among non-Legendaries, and proportionately long for a Pokémon based on a freaking blue whale), but surprisingly light for its size; at 14.5 meters tall, at least twice as long, and only 390 kg heavy, it's less dense than air. A Wailord flying around in Pokétopia is actually more realistic than a Wailord swimming in the Almian sea.
  • The Super Smash Bros. series has Poké Balls that can be used to summon random Pokémon; one of the random summons is Goldeen, which will Splash uselessly on the ground when summoned (a role usually reserved for Magikarp). However, all other aquatic Pokémon will proceed to float about and contribute to the battle on behalf of the Ball's thrower.
  • Pokémon Black and White gives us the pure Electric-type lampreys Tynamo, Eelektrik and Eelektross, whose Levitate ability literally makes them float. As such, this negates their only weakness to Ground and hence making them have no weaknesses at all (apart from Gravity/Mold Breaker).
  • Stunfisk appears to be a fish, and can be found in water, but it's Ground/Electric type, which is likely why Cilan's is seen more often in the anime than Misty's Goldeen. However, it just so happens to be capable of flight.◊ How that works aerodynamically, we may never know.
  • Pokémon X and Y gives us the squid Inkay. It's not a Water type (it's Dark/Psychic) and floats in its animation. Even more bizarre is that they are found in tall grass instead of water.
  • Inverted with Lugia. It's a Psychic/Flying bird, but it's also known as the 'Guardian of the Seas'. It can be seen swimming on Soulsilver's title screen, and can learn some water moves, like Hydro Pump, Rain Dance, Surf, Waterfall and Dive.
  • Pokémon GO: With AR mode on, you can actually have a flying Seaking on Earth, sorta. Even with AR mode off, many Water-type Pokémon appear floating above ground, sometimes far away from the nearest body of water!
• Serilly the mermaid from Puyo Puyo zig-zags the trope depending on the game. She swims through the air as a mook in Madou Monogatari, but the creator eventually forgot this, pinning her underwater. Then she starts carrying a magic stone which allows her to move around out of the water. Then it gets even more flip-flop in Puyo Puyo Chronicle where her overworld model has her in her washbin, yet floats around in combat screens.
• Quest 64's lack of being able to be in water is the only reason why the monsters appear as they do. The Magma Fish are made of lava, while the Winged Sunfish could justify it by their name in general. The other Water-aligned monsters don't have this problem, even the other two fish themself.(Fishman and Granagach)
• Quest for Glory I has Mantrays, which are flying mantas. That cast spells. And live in a forest. In the game world's equivalent of the Alps.
• Rise of Legends: Flying mantas live in the deserts of Aio. The Alin use them for their mounted archers, the Heartseekers.
• Rune Factory Frontier: There's an enemy that resembles a flying lamprey.
• The Flying Machine level in Shovel Knight features large jellyfishes that float in the air, providing a stepping stone for your Shovel Blade (when they are not emitting electricity, that is).
• Skeleton Warriors have gigantic floating jellyfishes in the caverns as one of the non-skeletal enemies. Who attacks by floating above Price Lightstar and dropping their acidic spits.
• Skies of Arcadia takes place in a World in the Sky where fish swim through the air as if it was water. You can even fly your ship through a school of them to capture them with nets and then sell them for profit at the larger markets. There are a few water fish in the Far East, but that's it.
• Slashout contains giant floating cuttlefishes called "Seppia" as enemies near the end of the game.
• Sol Divide has flying purple jellyfishes infesting the underground caverns.
• Something Else has floating electric jellyfish. They are the main obstacle of Electricave and dodging them can be very tricky,
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic Heroes, the Egg Fleet consists of flying battleships that resemble sharks, sawfish, and manta rays. The (huge) flagship, Final Fortress, resembles a whale shark.
    Big: Look at all the fishy ships!
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2: The Sky Chase zone features airborne missiles shaped like sharks.
• Spectrobes: All of the fish-based Mons can battle outside of water with no issue.
• Two Salmonids in Splatoon 3 can fly through the air without any machinery: the Flipper-Flopper, a Boss Salmonid who attacks by forming ink rings on the ground and diving into them, and the monstrous Horrorboros, a King Salmonid who forms lethal bombs in its mouth to spew toward players.
• Star Fox: Sector Y is an ocean in space, featuring giant space schools of fish, stingrays both small and large, squid and even amoebas. There's also a Space Whale but it's friendly and only appears when certain conditions are met. Oddly enough, the boss for the level isn't anything like that, instead a hydrogen harvester spaceship. It does resemble a tentacled creature (and its name includes "Hydra", a very small relative of the anemone).
• Star Wars:
  • Knights of the Old Republic: Flying manta rays known as brith are part of the background scenery on Dantooine.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic: Thrantas, flying animals resembling a cross between a whale and ray, are used as flying taxi mounts on Alderaan.
• Stinkoman 20X6: Level 9 has Stinkoman flying through the jungle in the Stinkowing (a ship that resembles Strong Bad's mask). The enemies include: shrimps, jellyfish, mantas, sharks, fish, clams, octopuses, anemones, and CORAL. To top off the weirdness, the boss (allegedly an octopus or squid) is a gangster with a tommy gun!
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: Some levels have Cheep-Cheeps jumping out at Mario as he tries to cross a broken bridge to the castle with no visible body of water beneath them.
  • Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels throws flying Bloopers (squid) into the mix in World 9.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii has flying manta rays that can be used as platforms.
  • Super Mario Odyssey: Brigadier Mollosque-Lanceur III, a giant squid, is fought while he is hovering above water.
  • Super Mario Maker: Bloopers can hover in the air in the same way as they swim underwater.
  • Super Mario Maker 2: Like in the first game, Bloopers can hover in the air like they would swim underwater. In addition, Cheep Cheeps and Fishbones swim in the air in Sky and Airship courses during nighttime.
  • Mario Party 5: The minigame Fish Upon A Star takes place in a star-shaped platform suspended in the skies. As time passes, Cheep Cheeps will clash onto the platform, making it crumble piece by piece, and the objective is to avoid falling down. This being Mario Party, the character can also sabotage each other with kicks, punches and ground pounds. The last remaining player wins, though more than one can win if they survive after 60 seconds; conversely, if the last remaining players fall at the same time, the minigame ends in a tie.
• Temtem: Aquatic Temtem float above the ground during battle. Ukama is shown floating in the air in the 1.0 animated trailer, which implies that this is diegetic, unlike in Pokémon.
• Terraria has flying fish that appear during the rain. A similar-looking fish called the Zephyr Fish can be equipped as a pet. Duke Fishron, whom a player must fish from the ocean using a particular kind of bait, also qualifies, and is considered by most to be a difficult late-game boss - though he is entirely optional.
• The Cambion Drift in Warframe is home to various fish and fish-like creatures that can both swim in the thick exocrine and float outside of it, allowing players who haven't acquired a specialized fishing spear from Daughter Entrati to still catch them with other spears which cannot penetrate the exocrine.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Nether Rays are flying creatures that bear a resemblance to stingrays. They aren't actually fish, though — apparently they're more closely related to insects than anything else.
  • There are more traditional-looking stingrays in Nazjatar, which presumably swam when it was underwater but somehow learned to fly in the open air when the ocean was drained away from it.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X has nearly every Piscinoid enemy type fly. Many are even shown leaping out of the water when the player approaches, even though in most cases the water wasn't nearly deep enough to submerge in.
• Yume 2kki has Flying Fish World, a series of floating green buildings with goldfish swimming by in the air.

Web Animation

• How to Kill a Mockingbird: The Sky Pirates ride of the backs of flying sharks.

Webcomics

• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: When battling the Followers of the Icosahedron in the climax, their forces include a whale-sized void shark that swims in midair.
• Daughter of the Lilies: One comic depicts a pod of flying whales soaring high in the sky.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Parodied with a floating octopus that is quite relieved to find water.
  Smith: I think you should really be in the ocean...
  Octopus: So that's what I've been doing wrong!
• Homestuck: Eridan's introduction features him riding a giant flying seahorse and hunting an even larger flying whale.
• Tower of God features giant eels floating through the sky. A partial justification is the fact that the surrogate for air in the Tower is Shinsu, something that can concentrate in certain areas, especially on higher levels of the Tower, giving everything some buoyancy.

Web Original

• Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged: The "flying space eel" Bottomswell engages the party without the Required Secondary Powers this trope otherwise mandates. The instant Cloud points this out, it dies.
• Neopets: Most of the time, legless aquatic pets, such as Kois (resembling goldfish), or most pets painted Maraquan (which will make land-based pets a more aquatic form), will be shown hovering in customization and during games such as the Altador Cup. Other times, they will be shown standing up on land, as is the case with the Shenkuu Petpet shopkeeper (a Koi). And then there's the Peophin (resembling a Hippocampus), which is the only case that gives an in-universe justification, in the form of being naturally gifted in magic and using that to levitate.
• Orion's Arm: The upper atmosphere of To'ul'h Prime, a planet describable as "wet Venus", is full of floating phytoplankton analogues and a variety of animals resembling sealife like whales and jellyfish. Surface life, such as the sophont to'ul'h (resembling a cross between starfish and bats) mostly lives off detritus from above the cloud layer. In the past some to'ul'h civilizations built airships and went "skywhaling" to harvest lift gasses, usually precipitating ecological disasters that would take millennia to recover from^note the last skywhaling culture collapsing 7,500 years ago, with First Contact with Terragens 4,000 years in the future.

Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: The Warp of Confusion hosts fish flying through the air. Whether or not they're native to the zone or creations of Robotnik's cousin Warpnik is open for debate.
• Aladdin: The Series: Xerxes is Mozenrath's flying eel companion.
• Ben 10: Alien Force: Jetray's species is called Aerophibian, fittingly enough for an alien manta ray that can fly through space and breathe underwater. The latter part is almost an Informed Ability, as Ben only ever used Jetray underwater once throughout the whole series.
  • Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: Ampfibian, an Electric Jellyfish, is also able to fly.
• Blackstar: The Airwhales of Ancar appear in an episode that draws heavy influence from the tale of Moby Dick.
• Code Lyoko: The Mantas from Cyberspace are capable of flight.
• Dragons: Riders of Berk:
  • Most of the dragons, even the most flying specialized, are still very capable swimmers, and vice-versa. Many even use their wings as paddles, not unlike several seabirds. Must come in handy when fish is a major part of many species' diet. Most Tidal class dragons are unable to fly since their wings act like paddles and some are much bigger for their wings to prevent them to fly.
  • While not a sea-creature as such, Thunderdrum dragons are both adept swimmers and flying Lightning Bruisers.
  • The Scauldron dragon is another Tidal class dragon that is both an adept swimmer and flyer, but it is not as fast as a Thunderdrum.
• Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid: Winnie the seahorse, hovering in the air.
• The Dreamstone: Albert is a fish that swims through the air and has the face and behavior of a dog.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Because everything is backward in the world of Trolla, actual flying fish are a natural species of wildlife the characters can see whenever they visit.
• In Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Flora has a friend/pet named Brock, who is a flying/floating fish.
• Looney Tunes: Porky Pig and his cat Pussy deal with a nutcase of a flying fish in "The Sour Puss."
  Fish: (bouncing itself up and down on Porky's line) Look, fellas! I'm a yo-yo! I'm a yo-yo!!
• The Magic Key: In “The Patchworker”, fish are seen flying down the roads as one of the signs that Patchwork Land hasn’t quite been put together right.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Princess Twilight Sparkle, part 2": During Twilight's magic potion-induced flashback to the time when Luna and Celestia first overthrew Discord, the chaos that gripped Equestria under his rule included schools of colorful fish swimming in midair.
  • In "Non-Compete Clause", the main characters are menaced by a school of biteacudas, carnivorous fish with bat wings. While they normally stay in the water like regular fish, their wings — at least in the case of changelings taking their form — are capable of sustaining powered flight out of the water.
• The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello has sky-dwelling fish.
• ReBoot: In "Painted Windows", Hexadecimal's recreation of Dali's work has flying fish as well.
• In StarCom: The U.S. Space Force, Jupiter has a thriving ecosystem of flying sea creatures. Jovian kites resemble giant manta rays, while the airwhales they prey upon resemble giant jellyfish.
• Transformers: Rescue Bots: "Flobsters on Parade" is an early episode where the Burnses and their bots have to deal with flying lobsters.

Real Life

• Contrary to the name, neither flying fish nor flying squids actually fly. Technically they both glide. The freshwater hatchetfish of South America, however, arguably does. It has winglike fins and powerful chest muscles, and they will flap their fins at high speed to power their leaps out of the water. Whether this counts as true flight in the sense that birds and bats do is debatable.
• And then there's this fish-shaped balloon that is capable of powered flight. These were trendy toys for a while, including clownfish and great white shark models.
• Fortean Times loves this sort of story. In fact, one of the Ur-Example Fortean phenomena was a mysterious shower of fish and shellfish over Cromer, Norfolk, in 1887. Explained away as a mysterious, unwitnessed and never-found Mad Fishmonger who went around town in the early hours of the morning flinging buckets of produce everywhere, the mystery may have been solved. East Anglia gets tornadoes (yes, we have them in Britain too, but not to Mid-Western standards of severity or destruction). A waterspout originating at sea might have travelled inland, depositing marine life it picked up as it ebbed and died. Similar rains of fish have been reported world-wide and have happened often enough and to too many people to be dismissed as hoaxes or delusions. People have reported seeing fish seemingly flying through the air in high winds and storms. Parodied in the Discworld novels, where mysterious rains of fish come in the form of canned pilchards, anchovies and sardines. You have to duck a lot or wear a steel helmet.

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